He threw himself on the couch.  After a moment of reclining upon it, during which he mopped his brow and drew his handkerchief about his neck, he rose and jerked the couch toward one of the two open windows.  When he had lain in this new situation for the space of two minutes more, he got up again and sought the tiny kitchen, where he could be heard drawing water from the tap.  “Ugh—­warm as dish water!” Uncle Timothy could hear his distant splutter.

Bob and Alec were out somewhere—­presumably cooling off in one of the city parks or on the river front.  Also, they were getting impatiently through the hours before Sally’s return.  The entire Lane household had reached the point where her coming home seemed a thing never to be attained.  To a man, they felt that one week more without her would be unendurable.

But the next day—­it was Sunday again—­she came home.  Josephine and Max, with the Burnside carriage and horses, brought her to the door.  Max and Alec, making a “chair” of hands and wrists, carried the pitifully light figure up the four flights of stairs, and Josephine hovered over the convalescent as she was established upon the couch, among many pillows.  The rest of them stood about in a smiling circle.

“Oh, but it’s good to be home!” sighed Sally, happily, looking from one to another with eyes which seemed to them all as big as saucers, so deep were the hollows about them and so thin her cheeks.  “But how pale and tired you all look!  What in the world is the matter with you?”

“The truth is, I think, dear,” explained Josephine, glancing from Max to Uncle Timothy, “your family have been having typhoid.”  Then, at Sally’s startled expression, she added, gently, “It’s almost as wearing, you know, to have a fever of anxiety over somebody you love as to have the real thing in the hospital.”

“Oh!” exclaimed Sally, softly, and her eyes fell.  Then she drooped limply against her pillows.  “It’s—­just a little hot to-day, isn’t it?” she murmured.

Alec consulted the thermometer.  “It’s ninety here now,” he announced.  “At ten o’clock in the morning!  About three this afternoon, Sally, you’ll see what we can do here.  And no let-up promised by the weather man.”

Bob brought a palm-leaf fan, and perching himself at the head of Sally’s couch, began to fan her.  “I’ll produce ’breezes from the north and east,’” he promised.  “Al, why don’t you get her some ice-water?  We began to take ice yesterday.”

“Only yesterday?” questioned Sally, with her eyes closed.  But she forbore to ask why they had delayed so long.  Well she knew that illnesses are expensive affairs.

“If you only had let us take you to our house!” cried Josephine, for the tenth time since she had first proposed that plan.  “We could have made you so much more comfortable.”

Sally opened her eyes again.  “No, you couldn’t, Joey,” she said, “unless you had taken all the rest of them.  I couldn’t spare my family another day!”